recipes to live for

For our friends Alice & Tom‘s Babywarming/Birthday party, I wanted to make something a little different, a little brunchier than my typical uber-rich chocolate cupcakes. Since I have a pantry full of apricot jam I decided to make apricot cupcakes.

I used the “Golden Vanilla Cupcakes” recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World which, by the way, you should own if you don’t already. No cookbook on my shelf is more dog-eared than this one. The recipes are truly delicious and even the most hardened butter lovers will have to admit that these are damn fine cupcakes, rivaling animal product filled-pastries any day. Why vegan, Heather? After all, you eat bacon like it’s going out of style! Well, my husband is lactose intolerant and the percentage of my friends that are vegan is high enough that there’s always a couple of people whose faces will light up when you tell them your cupcakes are vegan. Plus, as I already mentioned, these are fantastic cupcakes in their own right. Frankly, I’ve tried making non-vegan cupcakes and they’re just not as good, not as moist and flavorful. And just look at them!

As I said, I used the “Golden Vanilla” cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I added an extra 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract because almond and apricot are two flavors that go together fabulously. Once the baked cupcakes were cool, I poked a hole in the center of each one and used a chopstick to shove some apricot jam in there. Yum. I made frosting according to the “Raspberry Buttercream” recipe in the same book, substituting about 4 tablespoons of apricot jam for the raspberry syrup. I threw in another 1/4 teaspoon of that almond extract in to boot. The result? Wonderfully moist, apricoty, almondy cupcakes. Happy Sunday!